Current events general chat

Here are my opinions. Opinions, not facts.

Probably not. The problem is if there is a 1% chance Putin will use nukes, that is very frightening.

It's scary to think of a two way nuclear fight between Russia and the United States, but thinking on a smaller scale, Putin wants to take Ukraine. A nuclear wasteland is a poor prize.

Putin used to be the head of the KGB. I think he can quell his internal rivals. Putin is still fairly old. No one lives forever. When Putin dies, I don't see his successor (whomever it is) being able to maintain his level of control.

No matter what happens, Ukraine will be in poor shape. Putin is so obsessed with maintaining face he won't accept defeat he will sacrifice anything and anyone to "win", even if it's a pyrrhic victory.

The best Ukraine can do is make the Russian military pay dearly for their occupation and keep up a resistance as long as they can while they are waiting for Putin to die. Then after Putin dies, Russia's new leader will probably graciously withdraw from Ukraine, and Ukraine can petition for something like the Marshal Plan to rebuild it.

The best the rest of the world can do is make Russia pay so dearly for this, it will dissuade others from trying anything like this, cough cough Taiwan cough cough

 

It's not impossible, but pessimists are happier people than optimists because 90% of the time they are right, 10% of the time they are pleasantly surprised.

"Revolution" might be an overly strong term. There was a joke in the Soviet Union, "They pretend to pay us, so we pretend to work."

According to some reports, Putin already has this issue. The Russian soldiers are not especially motivated. The CCP is dealing with this indirectly with the so called "Lying Flat" movement.

If an authoritarian regime can not be opposed directly, you can oppose them by not supporting them or supporting them in a half-assed manner.

A lot of political prisoners in the Soviet Union turned into slave workers would quietly sabotage stuff. A lot of railroad workers laid down 99% good tracks but they deliberately sabotaged the tracks at bridges and critical junctures, a lot of Soviet trains derailed.

Supposedly the Russian soldiers are demoralized, but that doesn't mean they cannot win. Numbers usually tell. They are still motivated not to be killed by Ukrainians or by Putin.

 

interesting, i'm gonna join this.
I will list some things i know, and some things i think.

1 - forget about internal coups. not only because Putin is smart and was the commander of KGB... old soviet school. But in the course of years he has eliminated the opposition and his remaining adversaries are rightfully wary. And russian historically don't make coups. Yeah, the october revolution... a peculiar historical period, doubled with famine. In the following decades, no one has ever tried something against the current leader.

1 bis - the only real opposition Putin can find is represented by the russian billionaires. if they go to him saying "stop this, you are damaging us", then he could listen. Putin is a devious, smart dictator... He knows that powers and money go along, he doesn't want to alienate real russian money.

2 - i do believe he has a dream. He was raised in the Soviet Union, he wants to be remembered as the one that restored the old "Empire". Crazy as you want, but i believe that's one of the cores of the issue. And one of the reasons so many of the russian people still support him so vehemently.

3 - He's not bat-crazy. the russian army, right now, is not pushing in Ukraine. Yeah, maybe Ukrainian are making more resistance than expected, many soldier may be demotivated, but they are definitely not pushing, there is more military activity from the "allies" of Putin, namely the pro-russian republics nearby Ukraine.
if they are not pushing, is because Puting is holding them back... for now. Why? because before going all in, he would consider some acceptable "minor win":
3a - he certainly wants some territorial gain. the most precious territories, of course. Crimean peninsula and so on.
3b - he probably wants a declaration of surrender. Something that he can spend as home propaganda.
3c - he probably wants some insurance about NATO out of the picture. this leads us to the next point...

4 - i've read a very interesting interview from a general, and not a mr nobody, but a past commander in chief of the NATO military operations in Europe. So, not a fool and certainly not a socialist. He says that we (as western people) may not be aware of this, but it's been at least 20 years that we, as NATO, are politically messing with the border states of Russia. We disattended many of the agreements we did with Gorbachev. We (as NATO) are the ones that created the premise for all of this mess. So (he concluded), the situation is not as simply as we are told right now, and Russia is not lying when it's worried about the "NATO influence" on its borders.

5 - if Europe wanted to "strangle" Russia with economic, we should have started10 yrs ago, decreasing our dependency from Russian natural power sources.


In the end, IDK where we are heading for.
But it seems clear that we, as NATO / Europe, are not willing to force Putin's hand, now that s* & fan, you know.
We don't like it, but we want to minimize the losses and certainly we are not going to send troops in Ukraine. At most, if things go really bad, ONU will go in as military observer.
THis only means that Putin will obtain what he wants. The question is "how much of it" and "at what price for Ukraine?"

 

People keep talking about oil and natural gas from Russia to the EU.

Russia has had one major export to the United States, and probably the rest of the world as well. Russia produces a large percentage of the world's nitrate fertilizer.

Ukraine, also produces a lot of fertilizer. And they are a net exporter of wheat.

Planting season is coming soon in the United States. I am not a farmer but I am surrounded by farms. I haven't heard of the US president or any of the farm belt governors announcing plans to seek alternative sources of fertilizer.

For all I know, because fertilizer is a bulk item we got fertilizer shipments months. I am not sure.

But I expect this to be a bad year for crop yields and thus food prices are going to go up. Also, fuel prices affect food prices because food has to be shipped. Also, inflation in general is up.

I don't know what Russia's domestic food situation looks like, but China has already had a series of floods devastate their own farm belt and an outbreak of swine flu had forced them to dispose of a huge quantity of pigs.

Food prices are going to go up around the world. This is going to inconvenience many but it's going to get some vulnerable people killed.

It's not a coincidence we have out of touch celebrities, journalists and academics telling Americans to kill their pets. As if I couldn't dislike Bloomberg more...and now Mark Rufallo has made my "never pay to watch a movie with him in it list.

 

June of 2020. A new strain of the 2009 virus that used to be in the news. As far as I know, the CCP's agriculture ministry was able to prevent this from spreading to humans, but this still resulted in millions of breeding sows having to be put down and they have still haven't recovered fully since then and pork prices in China are still much higher than normal.

Note, pork is easily the most consumed meat in China and a lot of Chinese people weigh their satisfaction with the government by the price of pork (especially older Chinese) in a similar way to Americans weigh their approval of the government by the price of gasoline (especially older Americans).

Maybe comparing pigs to gasoline is not the best comparison but I think it's valid. The Chinese government even has a strategic pork reserve (though it was woefully inadequate for this shock to the market).

Unrelated tangent. Canada has a strategic maple syrup reserve. First World problems, huh?

 

I called it, but this is worse than I thought.

 

The Russian army is shipping large numbers of Ukrainian civilians deep into Russia proper.

Since I follow a lot of news about the CCP my imagination is running away with me. Putin and Winnie the Pooh are staunch allies, but Putin used to be in charge of the KGB so I doubt he needs to copy the CCP to do something despicable.

Are these Ukrainian civilians being brainwashed to being loyal Russians? That is the least scary thing I can think of.

Based on what the CCP does with enemy ethnicities these poor Ukrainians could be enslaved in factories, systematically raped, subjected to crude medical experiments, murdered for their organs, or they could just be round up and killed so Russians can take their homes and farms.

And course, not every captured civilians needs to be subjected to the same awful fate so it could be all of these things.

 

This is the first time in history a country was happy to have hundreds of American drones flying towards them.

 

Try the direct link.